Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
FORGET metro-, uber- and psycho-sexual. Man has always been — and always will be — sexual.
Anywhichway you look at it, sex is always on our minds, and if we’re not doing a quick and dirty, we’re thinking of it.
The male brain, as we’re the first to admit, is directly connected to the ‘manhood’, and matters of worldly import affecting millions of people around the planet have often been made while we’re thinking of — or engaging in — a sexual act. That’s why half the world loves Bill Clinton, he was always on the job.
We don’t just think of sex every three seconds, we’re thinking of it every second. We’re always on the pull and will use any help to get ahead of the next guy, so if a new deodorant is going to help us get a leg over, we’ll buy it.
That’s why the old Roger-Palmer-video-type ads were so effective: show us a guy surrounded by his apparent conquests and tell us it’s green cheese that’s got him kicking around so much, and there’ll be a run on green cheese down at Spinney’s.
Now Marian Salzman, a clever chick in advertising up in New York decided to take advantage of that, did herself a google and came up with Mark Simpson’s 1990s word, metrosexual, proceeding thence to enrich cosmetics companies with new product lines for men. We could all get laid easier, we were told, if we cleaned our ears more often and washed our faces now and again. Willingly, we acquiesced, checked out trolleys full of stuff and put on pointy-toed shoes, and yes, our success rate shot up.
In the meantime, in a twist unique to the breeders, women, as always, having uncaged a new animal, are at a loss to deal with it (remember Pandora?) and are now fed up with having to battle for bathroom time, product shelf space and preening partners, are desperately trying to collar their men once again, and trying to convince them to grow their chest hair anew.
But like the first metrosexual of them all, Adam, will tell you, once you’ve digested the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you can hardly throw it all back up — so what we’re now seeing is the male of the species settling down. The ubersexual, then, as defined by Salzman herself, is the metrosexual redefined, beyond the hand creams and the waxed chests. Men, she said, all alarmed by the gay connotations of the word metrosexual, will need to rely on their erudition and professional success, to be acknowledged and idealised in contemporary society.
Translation? Nothing succeeds like success. Simpson has a new word for it: retrosexual. These are guys that, like your father, needed a woman to feed them, clothe them and lie back for them.
But then, metrosexual or not, gay or straight, that’s what man has always been about: thump your victims till they’re unconscious, drag them into your cave and have your way with them. Then have them get up and cook you breakfast.
Now that technique’s got a lot going for it.
